In the 1930s two draughtsmen at a map company invented a town so they could catch anyone who copied their work. They took their own initials, rearranged them, and put Agloe at a dirt crossroads north of Roscoe. It was a signature disguised as a hamlet.

Some years later Rand McNally published a map with Agloe on it. The draughtsmen prepared to sue.

They lost, because by then there was a building at the crossroads called the Agloe General Store, put there by someone who had consulted a map to find out what the place was called.

The trap sprang, and what came out of it was a town.

The store is gone now. The crossroads is still there. For a period of decades the sequence ran: name, then map, then building, then place, then name again — and at no point in that sequence is there a location where you could say the real Agloe was, and be answering a question rather than casting a vote.

Every cartographer does this. There are trap streets in the city you live in. You have driven past a fiction and not turned into it because you had somewhere to be.